Secretary General Caroline Falconer reflects on "Nordics United in Arbitration", a joint event held in Copenhagen on 7 October 2026 where the SCC and the other Nordic arbitration institutes made a united case for the region as a destination for resolving international commercial disputes.

I want to take you back a few decades, to the Cold War.

At a time when East and West could barely agree on where, or whether, to hold a conversation, let alone resolve a dispute, heads of state and companies from opposing corners of the world needed a neutral forum they could trust. They found it in the Nordics, in Stockholm.

Stockholm became one of the trusted venues for high-level meetings between East and West, something we still see today: the China-US talks held in Stockholm last summer, and the meeting between North and South Korea at a Swedish Embassy in 2019 are recent reminders of that role.

I believe that it is all about trust, stability, transparency, and pragmatism. You can trust a Swede, someone from the Nordics. You can trust a Nordic lawyer.

It is not only politicians who have chosen Sweden as a trusted venue for important meetings. Companies have done the same. International parties from every part of the world have entrusted the SCC with their sensitive disputes since the mid-1970s. This is the origin of the SCC.

Three words to describe the Nordic way

At the event in Copenhagen, I reflected on three words that I believe capture the Nordic way of doing things: stability, transparency, and pragmatism.

Stability means that an institution has to outlast the politics of the day. Governments change, alliances shift, sanctions are put in place. Yet, the SCC has remained constant: a forum whose rules and reputation does not move with the changing winds.

Transparency sits at the heart of being Swedish. Many will know about offentlighetsprincipen, the Swedish principle of public access to official documents, part of the Swedish constitution. It gives everyone the right to access official documents held by public authorities, with the purpose of promoting the free exchange of opinion. That instinct runs through every Swedish lawyer. Apply it to an arbitration institute with wide-reaching confidentiality obligations, and you get an institution that publishes reports and statistics as a matter of course, giving users as much information as possible.

Pragmatism means that Swedes solves the practical problems in front of them, whether that is assembling an IKEA Billy bookshelf or solving a complex commercial dispute, without unnecessary layers of bureaucracy or complexity. Swedes do what works, not what looks impressive. And Swedes have zero patience for unnecessary delay.

The Nordics is not a region known for grand gestures. We are known for quietly building institutions that work, over time.

An appetite for what comes next

In addition to being stable, transparent, and pragmatic, the Nordics are early adopters. We love innovation. Many of the world’s largest technology companies, frequently use Sweden and the wider Nordic region to test new software. That says something about this region: we want to have the latest, and not only in phones, banking services, music, or furniture, but in dispute resolution too.

Many of the innovations in commercial dispute resolution have come from from this region and the SCC, or been early adopted: expedited arbitration in 1995, emergency arbitration in 2010, and the SCC case management platform (SCC Platform) launched in 2019, among others.

A shared habit of mind

So when we talk about stability, transparency, pragmatism, and innovation, we are describing a habit of mind that this region has practised for a very long time, one shared by five institutes across the Nordics, not just the SCC.

Choosing a Nordic venue for dispute resolution means choosing a forum where these qualities are not marketing claims but a working culture: a better process, and a better solution, for parties who need their disputes resolved.

Thank you to everyone who joined us in Copenhagen. I look forward to continuing the conversation on the future of arbitration in the Nordics.

Caroline Falconer, Secretary General, SCC Arbitration Institute